Facebook will no longer be free for companies

For more than an year now, there were announcements saying that Facebook will no longer be free for companies. And apparently now the time came that companies will start paying for Facebook services and that finally Facebook will get some money from their platform.

From today on, we can already see what they call Facebook offers.

Basically Facebook offer to companies the possibility to bring people to your business with an offer they can claim and even share with others, with their friends on Facebook.

3 kinds of offers:

In store only: People can print the offer from Facebook and go to a physical store and present the offer to the staff of the store in order to claim it.

Apparently the first time you try it, it is for free but then you need a budget to make it happen. The amount is depending on how many people do you want to reach with your offer. It is a little like the advertising marketplace program.

You can add a bar code or a QR code to your offer so your stores can even scan it (you can keep the trace of it in your system). You can also add terms and conditions to your offer, a limit date and even how many people maximum can benefit from it. You can play it very exclusive as exclusive offers may be found only in your facebook page. This should triggers the increase of fans.

The offers program is available only for pages with at least 400 likes. So if you are a very small business…. forget it.

Here an official Facebook video about offers:

And here a video from a online consultant giving you the tutorial about it:

Facebook is also working on a monthly fee for companies to use their platform. This would help them to generate a fixed sales figure through time, which makes Facebook more valuable and predictable.

The last update on that was:

20$/month for pages of less than 100,000 fans 50$/ month for pages between 100,000 and 500,000 fans 150$/month for pages up to 1 million 250$/month for pages above 1 million

Does not look much but overall, this will bring arounf 4 billion $ to Facebook. Not bad hein!?

Hopefully Facebook will finally bring real business services to companies that up to now were more patch-working on their pages rather than really making daily businesses with it. Mobile is also a challenge as many features of Facebook like apps are totally invisible on mobile. Ads from Marketplace were already mobile-compatible and now offers are also going the same way. To remind you, almost 40% of Facebook users are on mobile, some countries like USA and Switzerland are even around 80%.

Let’s see what Facebook will bring us in the future and also what the future will bring to Facebook.

If you wish to learn more about it, connect to the official Facebook help center page:

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